CSO to Perform Final works of MOZART & STRAUSS

On this special Easter-season program, the CSO and Music Director Jean-Marie Zeitouni will show how two great composers concluded their careers and bid farewell to earthly life. In the Requiem that 35-year-old Mozart left unfinished, he offered a compelling mixture of beauty, anguish, majesty, and drama. At 84, Richard Strauss looked back over a long, brilliant career in the achingly nostalgic Four Last Songs. Program will also feature guest soprano Susan Gritton and the Columbus Symphony Chorus, as well as a performance of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde.

The Columbus Symphony presents Mozart & Strauss at the Ohio Theatre (39 E. State St.) on Friday and Saturday, April 11 and 12, at 8pm. Tickets start at $25 and can be purchased at the CAPA Ticket Center (39 E. State St.), all Ticketmaster outlets, and www.ticketmaster.com. To purchase tickets by phone, please call (614) 228-8600 or (800) 745-3000. The CAPA Ticket Center will also be open two hours prior to each performance. Young people between the ages of 13-25 may purchase $5 PNC Arts Alive All Access tickets while available. For more information, visit www.GoFor5.com.

The 2013-14 Masterworks Series is made possible through the generous support of season sponsors Anne and Noel Melvin.

About CSO Music Director Jean-Marie Zeitouni

Jean-Marie Zeitouni, music director of the Columbus Symphony and principal conductor and artistic director of I Musici de Montréal, has emerged as one of Canada’s brightest young conductors whose eloquent yet fiery style results in regular re-engagements across North America. Also enjoying an association with Les Violons du Roy that goes back many years, first as conductor-in-residence, then as associate conductor, and since 2008, as principal guest conductor, he has led the ensemble in more than 200 performances in the province of Québec, across Canada, and in Mexico. In 2006, he recorded his first album with Les Violons du Roy entitled Piazzolla which received a 2007 JUNO Award for Classical Album of the Year in the category Solo or Chamber Ensemble. They also have two subsequent recordings—Bartok (2008) and Britten (2010).

Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements. Composed between 1857 and 1859, Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde premiered in Munich on June 10, 1865. It was inexorably influential among Western classical composers and provided direct inspiration to composers such as Mahler, Strauss, Szymanowski, Berg, Schönberg, and Britten. Many see Tristan as the beginning of the move away from common practice harmony and tonality and consider that it lays the groundwork for the direction of classical music in the 20th century.

About composer Richard Georg Strauss (1864–1949)

Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, also a prominent conductor throughout Germany and Austria. He is known for his operas and other orchestral works, such as Metamorphosen. Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Wagner and Liszt, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style. The Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra were his final completed works, composed in 1948, when the composer was 84. Strauss died in September 1949. The premiere of the work was given posthumously at the Royal Albert Hall in London on May 22, 1950, by the soprano Kirsten Flagstad accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Wolfgang Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era, composing from the age of five and performing before European royalty. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death. Mozart composed more than 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. The Requiem Mass in D minor was composed in Vienna in 1791 and left unfinished at Mozart’s death on December 5. A completion dated 1792 by Franz Xaver Süssmayr was delivered to Count Franz von Walsegg, who had anonymously commissioned the piece for a requiem mass to commemorate the February 14 anniversary of his wife’s death.

On this special Easter-season program, the CSO and Music Director Jean-Marie Zeitouni will show how two great composers concluded their careers and bid farewell to earthly life. In the Requiem that 35-year-old Mozart left unfinished, he offered a compelling mixture of beauty, anguish, majesty, and drama. At 84, Richard Strauss looked back over a long, brilliant career in the achingly nostalgic Four Last Songs. Program will also feature guest soprano Susan Gritton and the Columbus Symphony Chorus, as well as a performance of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde. Tickets start at $25 and can be purchased at the CAPA Ticket Center (39 E. State St.), all Ticketmaster outlets, andwww.ticketmaster.com. To purchase tickets by phone, please call (614) 228-8600 or (800) 745-3000. www.columbussymphony.com

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The CSO is grateful for the financial support provided by Franklin County and the City of Columbus. The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, education excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans. The CSO also appreciates the support of the Greater Columbus Arts Council, supporting the city’s artists and arts organizations since 1973, and the Charlotte R. Haller, James W. Overstreet, Kenneth L. Coe, and Jack Barrow funds of The Columbus Foundation, assisting donors and others in strengthening our community for the benefit of all its citizens.

About the Columbus Symphony Orchestra

Founded in 1951, the Columbus Symphony is the longest-running, professional symphony in central Ohio. Through an array of innovative artistic, educational, and community outreach programming, the Columbus Symphony is reaching an expanding, more diverse audience each year. This season, the Columbus Symphony will share classical music with more than 175,000 people in central Ohio through concerts, radio broadcasts, and special programming. For more information, visit www.columbussymphony.com.